<\/p>\n
VIDEO: Watch the Science of Cannabis : Clearing the Smoke.<\/h3>\n I like to think that one of the more important public services I provide here at Science-Based Medicine is my deconstructions of alternative cancer cure testimonials. After all, one of the most powerful marketing tools purveyors of cancer quackery have in their arsenal is a collection of stories of \u201creal patients\u201d with cancer who used their nostrums and are still alive and well. These sorts of analyses of alternative cancer cure testimonials began right near the very beginning of my not-so-super-secret other blog way back in 2004, metastasized\u2014if you\u2019ll excuse my use of the term\u2014to SBM in 2008, and have continued intermittently to this very day, most recently with a bevy of posts showing why the testimonials of Stanislaw Burzynski\u2019s patients do not constitute good evidence that he can cure cancers considered incurable by \u201cstandard\u201d medicine. In other words, Burzynski\u2019s \u201csuccess stories\u201d aren\u2019t the slam-dunk evidence he and Eric Merola want you to believe them to be regarding the use of antineoplastons to cure brain cancers.<\/p>\n
First, let\u2019s take a look at Mr. Wark\u2019s story. Since his story is so simple to deconstruct, I\u2019ll then look at more of the material on his website. Right on the front page of Mr. Wark\u2019s website, there is a brief blurb about him that reads:
Elsewhere, Mr. Wark states:<\/strong>And here is a video:<\/strong>The problem, of course, is that many solid tumors have already had cells detach from them and either invade further into the organ or circulate in the bloodstream. Only a very small fraction of these cells can lodge somewhere and form a metastasis, but when you\u2019re dealing with billions of cells or more the risk starts to become significant. In the case of Suzanne Somers\u2019 breast cancer, she underwent excision of her primary tumor, biopsy of her axillary lymph nodes, and adjuvant radiation therapy (although she now says that if she had to do it all over again she would refuse radiation as well). What she did refuse were adjuvant chemotherapy and adjuvant Tamoxifen, the estrogen-blocking drug that was (and still is) commonly used as adjuvant therapy for breast cancers that make the estrogen receptor. No doubt, given her well-known promotion of \u201cbioidentical\u201d hormones as a fountain of youth, Somers did not wish to do anything that would block the action of these hormones. I\u2019m also sure that her doctors almost certainly told her that she needed to knock it off with the bioidentical hormones while being treated for her cancer, a recommendation that was unlikely to have been well-received.<\/p>\n
Now here\u2019s the thing. The primary treatment for stage III colorectal cancer is still complete surgical resection. Everything else is icing on the cake. To illustrate this point, I ran an Adjuvant! Online estimate for the benefit of chemotherapy for a patient like Wark, who was 26 at the time of his diagnosis. This is a bit hard to do because I don\u2019t have complete staging information. However, Wark was nice enough to inform his readers that he had four positive lymph nodes and a \u201cgolf ball sized tumor.\u201d The latter bit of information doesn\u2019t help, because for purposes of staging size doesn\u2019t matter so much as how far the tumor has invaded through the layers of the wall of the colon, but the first bit of information about how many positive lymph nodes were discovered is quite useful because it tells me, when combined with the size of the cancer, that the original tumor was probably not stage IIIA.<\/p>\n
There are also two main chemotherapy regimens for colorectal cancer. One is basically 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) plus leucovorin and has been the mainstay of treatment of colon cancer for decades. However, over the last 10 or 15 years, a newer, more effective regimen known as FOLFOX has been developed that include 5-FU, leucovorin, and oxaliplatin. There\u2019s also an even newer regiment called FOLFIRI that is 5-FU, leucovorin, and irinotecan, but that one is not yet in Adjuvant! Online. So I\u2019ll stick to 5-FU and FOLFOX. What I did was to enter information provided by Mr. Wark on his website into Adjuvant! Online and make educated guesses about the rest in order to provide you with a graph that shows a ballpark range for the survival benefit that adjuvant chemotherapy would provide him. First, here is stage IIIB disease plus 5-FU-based regimens:<\/p>\n
Stage IIIB 5FU<\/strong>Next, here is stage IIIB disease and FOLFOX:<\/strong>Stage IIIB FOLFOX<\/strong>Stage IIIC FOLFOX<\/strong>Surgery does not cure cancer, especially not stage 3. If it did, that\u2019s all they would do. There would be no need for chemo and radiation. The medical industry has known that surgery does not cure cancer for at least 100 years. Cancer is a systemic metabolic disease, the result of a body that is nutrient deficient, overloaded with toxins, and has an overloaded or suppressed immune system. If the body is not given the essential nutrients it needs to repair, regenerate and detoxify, cancer will most assuredely [sic] come back after surgery. A diet rich in fruits and vegetables, juices and smoothies is the most powerful way to promote the body\u2019s ability to heal itself. All processed food must be eliminated. Animal products should be severely restricted or eliminated for a season until the cancer is gone. And it\u2019s ok if some people don\u2019t believe me. I know lots of survivors that have healed cancer without surgery, but skeptics won\u2019t believe them either.<\/p>\n
He is, quite simply, wrong that surgery does not cure cancer. For solid tumors like colon cancer, surgery is almost always the only way it can be cured. Indeed, even in the case of some stage IV disease (specifically, metastases to the liver), surgery can still \u201ccure\u201d colorectal cancer. Be that as it may, Mr. Wark had an estimated 30-64% chance of being \u201ccured\u201d of his cancer by surgery alone. However, those odds aren\u2019t good enough. Why should they be, when we can make them significantly better with chemotherapy? It is sad that Mr. Wark decided to decrease is odds of surviving his disease, particularly given how young he was at the time of diagnosis. It is even sadder still that he has decided to dedicate his life to persuading other cancer patients to make the same foolish choice that he did. As for \u201csurvivors that have healed cancer without surgery,\u201d as I have shown time and time again in other contexts, these stories rarely stand up to scrutiny either. In any case, looking at his testimonial, I see that his oncologist estimated that he had a 60% chance of survival. It\u2019s not clear whether that is with or without chemotherapy, but most of the time oncologists assume that the patient will accept standard-of-care therapy. That\u2019s why this piece of information makes me think that Mr. Wark was closer to a stage IIIC than IIIB and therefore leads me to believe that Mr. Wark took an even bigger chance with his life than I had originally thought.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s also instructive to take a look at the naturopath who treated Mr. Wark, a guy named John Smothers. Perusing his website you will find the usual naturopathic nonsense about \u201cdetoxification,\u201d chronic Lyme disease, \u201canti-aging\u201d diets, and the like. On Mr. Smothers\u2019 page on cancer, you will find metabolic blood tests, anticancer diets, intravenous vitamin therapy, detoxification, infrared sauna treatments, enzyme therapy, lymphatic massage, and something called Theotherapy, which purports to \u201crelease destructive emotional patterns that cause weakness in the body through prayer and grief processing. The body is a slave to the soul. What is in the soul will manifest itself into the physical body. Patterns of unforgiveness will lead to breakdown. Forgiveness must come from the heart. Most of the time this is in many layers.\u201d In other words, Mr. Smothers offers the usual cornucopia of pseudoscience and mysticism that naturopaths love so much, and Mr. Wark has completely bought into it. Indeed, take a look at his reasoning (such as it is) for refusing chemotherapy:<\/p>\n
Right from the start, it\u2019s easy to tell that Wark\u2019s reasoning will not be sound. He talks about how nurses have to wear gloves and try to protect their skin from chemotherapy while expressing horror that this is the same stuff that is put into patients\u2019 veins. Of course, patients go through their chemotherapy for six or nine or twelve months\u2014or whatever regimen\u2014and get dosed once every one to three weeks or so. Nurses deal with the substances day in and day out on a chronic basis, possibly over many years. The two are not comparable situations. Next, Wark refers to chemotherapy as \u201cpoisoning your way back to health.\u201d Well, yes and no. Sometimes, as Nick Lowe would say, you have to be cruel to be kind (in the right measure). Yes, chemotherapy is toxic, but it works and, unfortunately, we haven\u2019t found anything that works as well yet. Perhaps the silliest thing Wark says in this video is that he has to \u201cbelieve\u201d in the therapy he chooses and that \u201cif I really believed in chemotherapy maybe it would\u2019ve worked.\u201d Here\u2019s a hint: Truly effective anti-cancer therapy doesn\u2019t require you to \u201cbelieve\u201d in it. As has been said before, you can be in a coma, and antibiotics will still cure your pneumonia. In the same way, you can \u201cdisbelieve\u201d that chemotherapy can treat a cancer, and it will still work. Wark also doesn\u2019t help his case by citing the \u201c2% gambit\u201d about chemotherapy, which is misleading trope beloved of cancer quacks the world over. Wark is no exception.<\/p>\n
His last trope is that chemotherapy destroys the immune system. He discusses how, if you have cancer, it is the immune system that is keeping it in check and the reason that it\u2019s \u201cnot all over your body.\u201d Well, not exactly. He seems to forget that if his immune system had been as awesome as he thought it was he probably would never have grown a golf ball-sized tumor in his colon that spread to his mesenteric lymph nodes in the first place. Of course, his explanation is that it\u2019s the \u201ctoxins\u201d that overloaded the immune system and let the tumor develop. He then brings up an example of the patient who undergoes surgery and chemotherapy, thinks he\u2019s tumor-free, and then a few months later develops widespread metastatic disease. To Wark, this is because chemotherapy \u201cdestroyed the immune system.\u201d Yes, chemotherapy, depending on which drugs are being used, can temporarily suppress the immune system, but it doesn\u2019t destroy it. The immune system is quite good at rebounding after chemotherapy is done, and the destruction of the immune system is not the main reason why cancer can recur after a seemingly successful treatment. It\u2019s because our treatments aren\u2019t yet good enough to eliminate every last cancer cell. Some can go dormant, only to emerge later.<\/p>\n
Of course, Mr. Wark\u2019s testimonial is not enough. He\u2019s begun to collect testimonials of his own. The vast majority of them don\u2019t provide enough information to tell me one way or the other whether there\u2019s anything to them or not. I might have to take a look at a couple of them in more detail in the future, but for now I\u2019ll \u201ccherry pick\u201d a couple. Most of them are maddeningly vague, although some have fairly obvious explanations. For example, Ann Cameron claims to have cured herself of stage IV colon cancer with carrot juice. She had stage III colon cancer, underwent surgery, and refused chemotherapy. Later, she was noted to have lesions in her lungs suspicious for metastases. These supposedly disappeared with carrot juice. However, there is no record of any of these lesions having been biopsied. A PET scan showed \u201cspots\u201d that looked like lymph nodes, but again there is no mention of these lesions ever having been biopsied. My conclusion? These almost certainly were not metastatic cancer.<\/p>\n
Next up is a man named Jeffery Williams, who was diagnosed with stage III testicular cancer. He underwent surgery to remove the testicle but was found to have a mass in his abdomen. What follows is a prolonged story of his refusing chemotherapy, using megadoses of carrot juice, and following the Hallelujah Acres Diet, with Angstrom ionic liquid cesium and potassium, Solaray Tumeric and Essiac Tea, along with insinuations that his doctors lied to him about the tumor in his abdomen. At one point, he says he couldn\u2019t find a doctor willing to biopsy the mass, which sounds very odd given that an abdominal mass that\u2019s suspicious for tumor in a patient with a history of testicular cancer almost mandates a biopsy. Finally, a biopsy supposedly showed \u201c100% dead cancer cells.\u201d Of course, a biopsy showing \u201c100% dead cancer cells\u201d does not mean that therapy was working; it could simply mean that the tumor outgrew its blood supply, its center died, and the biopsy (presumably a needle biopsy) only got the center of the tumor. Be that as it may, this is what Williams describes after that:<\/p>\n
I also found a surgeon who was willing to remove my tumor. On April 20th 2010 I had a 9.5 hr. surgery to remove the tumor at Cleveland Clinic. I received 4 inches of incision from my first surgery in 2009 and 26 inches of incisions on my second surgery on April 20th 2010. I have had a cat scan once a year since April 20th and I have had no problems.
Of course, there are breast cancer testimonials, including those of Monique Norton, Susan Macco, and Ashlie Sanders (who appears to have had her entire tumor removed by the biopsy). They\u2019re all of the same variety as Suzanne Somers\u2019 testimonial. They all underwent surgery and eschewed other therapies, meaning that the surgery cured them. They all attribute their survival to whatever quackery they chose to pursue rather than the surgery. I\u2019m tellin\u2019 ya, as a breast cancer surgeon I sometimes get depressed at how little credit we are given.<\/p>\n
As glad as I am to see a cancer patient overcome the odds and beat his disease, it\u2019s truly depressing to see that same patient spread misinformation about the science-based medicine that saved him and then to promote all sorts of quackery. Look at his Resources page, for instance. It\u2019s a veritable cornucopia of quackery, up to and including Hulda Clark and Bob Beck, Gerson therapy, Ty Bollinger, Russell Blaylock, and more. Worse, he hides behind a variant of the quack Miranda warning in which he prefaces his advice with \u201cI\u2019m not a doctor and can\u2019t give medical advice,\u201d after which he basically gives medical advice. A great example is in response to a question from a 32 year old woman with breast cancer who has undergone surgery and is understandably frightened at the prospect of beginning her chemotherapy. Here\u2019s Wark\u2019s response:<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not a doctor and can\u2019t give medical advice, but obviously I chose not to do chemo because yes, it does destroy your immune system, and it is also a carcinogenic substance. I decided to do every natural therapy I could find FIRST. If none of it worked, then chemo would be my last resort. That was my plan.
Two of my favorite quotes:<\/strong>What I do have is nearly 10 years of experiential expertise. As you can tell by the vast amount of info on this site, I am an avid researcher on nutrition and natural therapies. I am deeply immersed in the alternative health community and I know many people who have healed themselves.
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